"Xerez offered to let us win for ¤120,000"

Match-fixing scandals continue to surface in Spanish football. The president of Girona, Joaquim Boadas, has let the cat out of the bag yet again. "Xerez offered to let us win for ¤120,000", said the chairman of the second-division club.

Following on from the report that Racing de Santander offered him a bribe to save the club from the drop, he now tells MARCA that Xerez also approached the Catalan club with a deal, offering to throw the game in exchange for money.

MARCA can exclusively confirm that Xerez was in fact offered an even greater bonus to win at Girona. Xerez was already relegated, and having a very bad run, so the players had little confidence in their chances of winning, and, as the Girona president now reveals to MARCA, they offered a lower figure to their opponents. "They can't have thought they had any chance of winning", Boadas says.

Oddly enough, Xerez did win the match (4-2) in one of the biggest shocks of the final stretch of the league programme. The excessive celebrations of the Xerez players heightened the controversy, and there were even subsequent confrontations with their own supporters. But what the fans did not know was that the Xerez players had just earned themselves a juicy bonus for those three points gained in Girona.

"What I want is for the real paymaster to be revealed. The person who offered such a big bonus to Xerez", says Boadas.